Opinion
By Jeff Childers
11/12/25
Good morning, C&C, it’s Monday! President Trump may have just had his best day yet. It’s an all-winning roundup: Democrats throw in the shutdown towel as eight ‘defectors’ join Republicans in ending debate about the budget in late-night surrender; Trump and Republicans prepare to roll out healthcare affordability plans right after Democrats picked that as their platform issue; the President topples BBC network after three-day war; and Trump forces pharma surrender after dramatic Oval Office on-screen collapse.
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Yesterday’s top story was (cue drum roll): Democrats caved. They crumbled like week-old cornbread. They barked but never hunted. They folded like Sunday laundry. They teed up for a hole-in-one and shanked it into the woods. Politico ran the story below the simple but electrifying headline, “The shutdown endgame is here.” TAW.
As you know, Republicans held the Senate in session all weekend. The pressure relentlessly piled up until the cracks became irresistible. By late afternoon yesterday, eight “centrist” Democrats defied their party and voted with Republicans to invoke cloture and end debate on a 90-day continuing resolution. Republicans only gave them a couple minor modifications, related to back pay and re-hiring federal workers fired during the shutdown’s first weeks.
But Democrats completely surrendered on their single claimed reason for forcing the country to endure 40 days of nonsense and angst. There will be no Obamacare subsidies. No participation trophy. Not even a cracker.
Cue faux outrage. Senator Bernard “Bernie” Sanders, 99, croaked, “Tonight, eight Democrats voted with the Republicans. And to my mind, this was a very, very bad vote.” Newly elected “centrist” governor of New Jersey, Mikie Sherrill, called it “malpractice.” Gavin Newsom groaned, “America deserves better.” USA Today’s headline blared, “It’s Democrat vs. Democrat as shutdown nears end.”
It sure looks that way. It looks like a Donkey Cage Match. Even though Senate Minority Leader Chuck “Chuckie” Schumer voted against the bill, House Representative Ro Khanna (D-Ca.) hotly demanded Schumer’s resignation:
Rank and file Dems were spitting bloody nails. We just elected Mamdani! We literally just swept last Tuesday’s elections! Why cave now?? Thus, and ironically, Democrat partisans blame Democrats for ending the shutdown. Last night, giving away the game, CNN breathlessly reported not that Republicans re-opened the government, but that the Democrat filibuster had been broken.
CLIP: CNN fingers Democrats for shutdown blame (0:24).
But … was it a defection by a few malcontents? Or was it a Democrat defeat? Not coincidentally, none of the eight Democrats who joined Republicans last night face re-election next year. (Two have already announced their retirement.) It wasn’t any rebellion. They got the green light. All the Democrats’ hand-wringing today is just a fake show for the base.
So how did Trump do it?
🔥 Last week, Trump sank the Democrats into a pressure cooker and locked the lid. Here are the four biggest ways:
- The Administration ensured that Democrats were squeezed from both ends of their electorate: SNAPpers on the bottom as food stamps trickled out in slow motion, and starting this weekend, laptop-class elites at the top whose flights were canceled and delayed.
- Senate Republicans busily advanced a “mini-bus” bill that would have funded SNAP and the military, which Democrats would have been forced to vote against, with ensuing horrible optics and painful political gymnastics.
- Trump started using the shutdown as an excuse to nuke the filibuster; and if that ever happens, Dems lose everything. And they know it.
- Most explosively, Trump nipped off the Dems’ “affordability” narrative while they were looking the other way. He tweeted a chart showing that Obamacare ‘subsidies’ don’t go to needy patients, but to rich insurance companies. Then he showed how insurance stock prices rocketed over 1,000% since Obamacare passed.
The shutdown isn’t quite over yet. But it is inevitabe now. Invoking “cloture” sends the bill off to the full Senate for debate and passage. They meet shortly, at 11am. Then, since the Senate’s version differs from the original House version, the House must approve it. The whole thing could wrap up today, finally ending the longest government ‘shutdown’ in American history. But it could also take a few more days. We’ll see.
But wait! There’s more.
🔥 During his weekend pressure campaign, President Trump snatched the Democrats’ brand-new campaign issue away. Recall that, following last week’s apparent electoral wins, Dems landed on “affordability” as the key to recapturing the vaunted “youth vote.” The economy is largely headed in the right direction.
But one of young Americans’ biggest affordability concerns is health insurance. It’s basically free while they’re broke and in school. But as soon as they land a decent job, health insurance suddenly costs more than a house payment.
Over the weekend, President Trump tweeted at Senate Republicans, encouraging them in all-caps to SEND THE MONEY STRAIGHT TO PATIENTS, NOT RICH INSURANCE COMPANIES. And, boom. Almost as if coordinated, Senator Rick Scott (R-Fl.), whose pre-politics fortune was made in Medicare claims processing, tweeted he was already drafting the bill:
Personally, I prefer ending Obamacare, letting people buy their own healthcare, and getting government all the way out of the doctor-patient relationship. But on a practical level, it will probably need to happen in stages. Right after Democrats landed on “affordability,” Republicans are preparing to clean the floor with an affordability mop.
And some Democrats, at least, are becoming aware of the deadly political peril.
Senate Finance ranking member and Portland Representative Ron Wyden (D-Or.) called Republicans acting against giant insurance companies a positive sign. “If they’re serious about going after the big insurance companies, I’m very interested in talking to them,” Wyden told Politico. Wyden added that he has talked to “a number of his Democratic colleagues who might also welcome discussion on the idea.”
I bet he has. Democrats are furiously discussing the Republican plan. And they should be, because it’s going to flatten them like a freight train.
🔥 After making such a song about healthcare affordability and subsidies for the entire month of October (and all ten days of November), can the Democrats realistically vote against a Republican bill to help people pay for healthcare and subsidize patients (especially younger ones)? They will find some way to oppose it, of course, but it’s going to hurt.
Trump murdered their Obamacare demands while they were sleeping. He handed Senators the answer: fund people, not insurance companies. Democrats must now choose between their patrons in the insurance lobby and clinging to their bogus affordability theme.
I assure you: the last thing the insurance companies want is for their multi-billion-dollar subsidies being deposited into their customers’ Health Savings Accounts instead of their investment accounts. This fight is going to get bloody.
Now. Who’s ready for some more delicious progressive capitulation?
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Talk about throwing in the towel. Yesterday, the Washington Post ran an unintentionally spectacular story headlined, “BBC’s top leaders resign over Trump speech editing controversy.” The UK Telegraph was more blunt: “BBC in crisis as Tim Davie resigns.” In short: President Trump wiped out the BBC’s top leadership with almost no effort.
Not everyone was happy. The Washington Post felt nothing less than a keen dagger of anguish, a blinding pain stretching from its lower mandible into its upper carapace. Another big media company folded. “Some legal scholars,” the paper explained despondently, “argue all these lawsuits and settlements have harmed press freedom in the United States.”
Sure they did.
While Democrats disgracefully crumpled in the well of the Senate, far across the Atlantic, the UK’s vaunted British Broadcasting Company ran up the white flag faster than Frenchmen hearing there might be a fight somewhere.
It started last year, right before the November elections. The BBC ran a great big primetime “documentary” about January 6th (of course). In the program, BBC editors spliced two Trump comments together, with fragments taken from parts of the speech 54 minutes apart. The President had said this:
“We are gonna walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be with you. I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
But the BBC ran a fake, spliced version:
“We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be with you and we fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not gonna have a country anymore.”
It was seamless, super sneaky, and designed to ‘prove’ Trump instigated violence. Here’s a YouTube report showing the two clips side by side, the fake edited one versus the original:
YOUTUBE: BBC edited clip compared to original (2:28).
🔥 Two months later, in January of this year, an internal whistleblower reported the modified clip to BBC management. In traditional British form, BBC executives were royally appalled at the mere suggestion of bias. After conducting a careful review, and consulting with inside and outside experts, the BBC’s gold-star committee determined that President Trump is a farty-head and an insurrectionist! So there!
Well, that was a paraphrase. More specifically, at the BBC’s Editorial Standards Committee meeting on May 12th, the BBC’s Deputy Director of News, Jonathan Munro, concluded about the doctored clip: “There was no attempt to mislead the audience about the content or nature of Mr. Trump’s speech before the riot at the Capitol. It’s normal practice to edit speeches into short form clips.”
Holy cow. Rather than a denial, you might instead call that a damning admission. Regular practice? I bet it is.
Later, in June, a frustrated BBC journalist compiled a long ‘dossier’ of evident bias in BBC reporting, which included the Trump edit, but also critiques the BBC’s fake-news approach to a constellation of issues from transgender to illegal migration to racism in car loans to the Gaza war.
Are you with me so far? All that internal activity and acrimony produced nothing but diffident snores from the BBC’s elite directors, which is mainly composed of men with weird titles like Lord Sandwich or the Earl of Tootles. But that smug arrogance was wiped from their sneering face four days ago, when President Trump —who apparently had had enough— went to war. Those aren’t my words. UK Telegraph, November 7th:
The ‘war’ was Trump’s fierce Press Secretary Leavitt, who told The Telegraph, “This purposefully dishonest, selectively edited clip by the BBC is further evidence that they are total, 100 percent fake news that should no longer be worth the time on the television screens of the great people of the United Kingdom.”
For a personal perspective, Leavitt added, “Every time I travel to the United Kingdom with President Trump and am forced to watch the BBC in our hotel rooms, it ruins my day listening to their blatant propaganda and lies about the president of the United States and all that he’s doing to make America better and the world a safer place.”
The war was over in three days. Last night, while Democrats were shamefully resigning from their brave resistance to the budget, the BBC’s top managers also quit in shame. Woke BBC Director-General (i.e. CEO) Tim Davie turned in his keys, and so did ultra-ally Chief Executive of News Deborah Turness. Bye, Felicia!
That’s not all. It’s spreading. This week, Parliament plans hearings on the BBC’s blatant bias. Senior MPs said the BBC must now “undergo a major shake-up,” which is a technical term for heading to the woodshed with dad. Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK, called for “wholesale change” at the BBC.
In other words, the BBC’s many enemies just got devastating new weapons. It’s hard to understate how badly Clipgate has annoyed the British. Just like in Lord Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade, someone had blundered. Badly.
The Telegraph added that more senior BBC staff, including Jonathan Munro (who called the edited Trump clip ‘normal practice’), “are also under pressure to leave, in what is seen as the BBC’s worst crisis since the Jimmy Savile scandal in 2012.”
The Telegraph’s invocation of Jimmy Savile gives you an idea of how big Clipgate could get. Jimmy Savile was a longtime BBC host and personality, and also the UK’s most prolific pedophile, who got away with decades of the most horrific kinds of child abuse you can imagine while BBC managers knowingly looked the other way. The scandal didn’t emerge till Savile died in 2011.
So, if they are comparing Clipgate to Jimmy Savile, well, it doesn’t get any worse than that.
🔥 The BBC resisted all accountability for Clipgate since January. Three days after Trump “went to war,” in the form of Karoline Leavitt’s critical comments, the BBC crumpled like a limp biscuit.
Trump always wins. TAW.
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We have one more story about undignified collapses. I’d discounted this story when it fell over last week, for two reasons; first, the hot takes were off the charts, and second, while the story gripped the public imagination, the meaning remained muddled. But now, its metaphorical significance is unmistakably delicious. Yesterday, the Washington Post ran the story, below the headline, “Ten seconds in the Oval Office that overshadowed Trump’s drug-price win.”
YOUTUBE: Man collapses behind President Trump during live Oval Office press conference (2:06).
If you were going to collapse somewhere, there could be a lot worse places to do it than the Oval Office during a health presser. Flanked by Trump’s top health team, during an ‘affordability’ press conference announcing lower prices for fat-loss drugs, an unidentified man dramatically slumped to the floor, right in Dr. Oz’s arms.
He’s fine. But social media went berserk.
The drama happened just as Eli Lilly CEO Dave Ricks took the podium to talk about his company and its two starvation drugs, Mounjaro and Zepbound. The guy who fell over turned out to be a patient who was there to tell how great he felt after taking Mounjaro. Whoops. Bad optics.
The announcement itself —now eclipsed by the fainting spell— should have been a blockbuster. Mounjaro, for instance, currently costs $1,350 for one month of injections. But now, for most eligible patients (Medicare, Medicaid, and the planned “TrumpRx” website), the price will shrink like a starving Haitian to a much more affordable $245 per month.
Similarly, Novo Nordisk, which makes Ozempic and Wegovy, were there to announce drastic price reductions too. Even more promising, the FDA is currently considering a tablet form of the popular GLP-1 drugs, and which will sell for only $149 per month on TrumpRx.
I’m skeptical of anything pharma offers, but GLP-1s may indeed be a bridge back to health for some adults. For morbidly obese folks who’ve tried every diet that came down the pike and still can’t lose weight, these drugs offer a non-surgical off-ramp. And the fact that these patients are universally grateful to stop eating proves there’s more to the problem than just desire and willpower.
GLP-1s are not a long-term fix. And Secretary Kennedy properly stressed that the Administration is also working to get healthier foods into schools and the military, and to increase physical activity in schools. They’re also trying to get better food in supermarkets. But, “In the meantime, there is nothing more important that we can do than lower this price,” Kennedy said.
So that’s good. But … what about the ‘collapsing’ metaphor I teased? Who surrendered? Big pharma. Big pharma is caving.
💉 “You think it was easy dealing with these pharmaceutical company executives? It wasn’t,” President Trump said. Secretary Kennedy said the cost-lowering agreement took “months and months” of negotiations.
That sounds right, but still. Something was missing. What was the negotiation, exactly? What did pharma get? That important part of the deal was missing from the story. One possibility is that pharma gets direct access to consumers through TrumpRx— which cuts out middlemen like insurance companies and pharmacies.
But mostly it’s the insurance companies.
💉 This might not be intuitively obvious, but big insurance makes big profits from drug markups. Believe it or not, they mark up some drugs by as much as 1,000%. Headline from NBC News, January:
The FTC’s report concluded that the insurance companies “profit at the expense of patients by inflating drug costs and squeezing Main Street pharmacies.”
In other words, Trump’s pharma deals are crushing big insurance. Just in today’s post, we see the President both ending their obscene Obamacare subsidies, and also letting pharmaceutical companies —which actually produce something of economic value— sell direct, around the insurers.
But that’s not all. Trump has also obviously brought big pharma to heel. Maybe not on vaccines —not yet— but everywhere else, they’ve given up, raised the white flag. These GLP-1 drugs are a great example. They are brand-new, just starting their most profitable patent periods, and customers measured in gross tonnage are willing to pay anything for what (for many) is easily characterized as a lifestyle accessory.
You could easily imagine big pharma agreeing to cut prices on drugs that have long passed into generic status, even discounting their name-brand versions, however reluctantly. But this? The so-called anti-obesity drugs are the crown jewels in pharma’s portfolio. Trump ‘convinced’ them to cut their most profitable products. (I’ve discussed before how I think Trump procured pharma’s surrender; he murdered Tylenol. See prior posts.)
Now, even Zoomers can afford GLP-1s. Consider that. Gen-Zers are the folks who most desperately want to fit into skinny jeans. They haven’t yet given up like the rest of us, who’ve long since acquiesced into elastic waistbands and “comfort fits.”
Honestly. How the Democrats plan to beat Trump on “affordability” is beyond my comprehension. Worse, they chose health insurance as their primary affordability issue. Trump, the master marketer, calls his cheap drug website TrumpRx, so every time a Zoomer refills their now-affordable prescription, it reminds them who to thank. (And who can argue about ‘TrumpRx,’ after they named the previous monstrosity after the community organizer-in-chief?)
Today arguably marks three of Trump’s biggest wins in one roundup— a new record. And I suspect this is still only the beginning. Get ready.
Have a magnificent Monday! You’d better get back here on time tomorrow. To paraphrase Ferris Bueller, things are moving fast. You don’t want to miss any of it. See you in the morning.
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The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida
